From time to time we'll get pixelation breakup or lockup for a few seconds only on our HD channels in the TV room, I don't recall ever noticing this in the other HD TVs in the house. We have Comcast Cable.

Would this be an issue with the cable box, their signal or a connection on my side? I've checked and doubled checked all of the connects and don't find anything abnormal.

Rick,
I have the same issue with my HD signal through cable. Being in Canada I of course do not have the same provider as you (I have Rogers) but this is a sporadic symptom I have become accustomed to. It is very brief and doesn't bother me for casual viewing. My in-laws have the same provider and the same issue as well with none of the same equipment as me, so I have just made the assumption it is signal breakdown from the provider.

Rick, if it's only happening on one TV in the house, I woulch check the cable from a splitter to that location. There could be a bad connector, bad shielding... any of of a number of problems.

I'll give it a try Mark, although I have checked and re-checked all connections back to the source. We completely lost service on Sunday and the Comcast phone service tech really got under my skin, whenever I was reporting the service out I also told her about the pixelation breakup and she replied that if they sent a tech out and it didn't happen while he was there I'd be charged a $35 service charge so I got snippy with her and she got equally snippy with me and actually hung up on me.

Yesterday I called Direct TV and their tech will be out between noon and four this afternoon to install the system, can't wait to call little miss snippy azz back to tell her to come get these damn ComCast boxes out of my house after having them for nine years.

Hi RickF,

I believe that occasional pixelation and/or drop-outs in audio when watching HD signals with 5.1 Dolby Digital are simply a function of cable providers shoving so much content down the line (high-speed internet, phone services, hundreds of standard and HDTV channels, on-demand services, multi-language, etc) that it's inevitable that a really wide-bandwidth signal like HD with multichannel sound--even with compression of both audio and video signals--will suffer from time to time.

I suppose it might be an unusually long HDMI connector (if that's what you are using from the Comcast box) or inferior HDMI that might cause it, but I don't use HDMI from my Time-Warner cable box and I still get occasional drop-outs. (On last night's episode of "24", the HD video was fine but I did have very brief audio drop-outs).

Also keep in mind that satellite services are not free of issues. Heavy rain (or snow) can knock out signals and there have been issues of DirectTV using too much compression on some channels in the past, resulting in blocky images and degraded quality. Although it's impractical for most of us, over-the-air terrestrial HD can be spectacular looking and free of video and audio anomalies if you're within reception range.

Regards,

Alan

I occasionally have this problem too; I have Comcast. Sometimes I switch tuners on the cable box and it improves somewhat. I wonder if it has to do with # of concurrent viewers. I remember it was particularly bad during the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, and also during SNL weeks before the election. Although, I don't see how #-of-viewers may affect the HD signal.

I get audio drop outs occasionally on Fox Rochester(HD). I have only noticed it with that station. I use satellite and my connections are DVI to HDMI from cable box to t.v and optical from cable box to receiver.

Audio drop outs are often your receivers 'graceful' way of dealing with incomplete or inadequate digital audio information. The cause, again, could be hundreds of things.

Alternately, my Bell HD-PVR seems to have a bug where these happen more and more often until I finally reboot the damn thing. This seems to indicate a problem with the receiver as opposed to the signal.

Hmm, I wrote a longish post yesderday explaining a bunch of different ways pixelization happens and how it is sometimes not your local providers fault but could be a problem upstream as most providers buy all their channel signals from multiple sources, not just one. ie, local weather is clear but the originating source feed in (wherever) is experiencing sleet or lightning near it's uplink dish.

I don't see it anymore so I must have pulled the old "forgot to hit Send after hitting Preview" stunt.

Good for you Rick. I ditched Comcast after six months of dealing with their incompetent billing and customer service staff. AT&T U-verse is what I use now with no complaints.

Rick:

As Alan said, generally cable companies are ramming everything they can down the line so when you look at the considerably wider bandwidth HD needs, I am surprised it doesn't happen more. The cable on our street is all underground with junction boxes at various points along the way connected to the various homes. Back several months ago we had a REALLY serious problem with break-ups, not only on the HD channels but ALL the channels. As it turned out many of these boxes had to be re-wired and new booster amplifiers installed along the way. When I phoned the company, they said they got a number of complaints on the street so I knew it had nothing to do with anything internal so that , inevitably, will be your determining factor if it is coming from the cable company. If you are the only one that has reported the problem then that is another matter. There is also the practical issue that most people, unlike many of us on this forum, are not tuned in to the nuances and small problems that may be occurring on their television screen. For them, it is either working or not. If nobody else complains then the cable company thinks the problem is with you.

Even today after all the repair work was done, there are STILL periodic breakups. I guess this is something we will have to live with in this multi-hundred channel, multi-communication network.

This is exactly my thinking. We have the same thing with our cable. Even though you have cable, you have to remember that the cable company get its signal from the channel providers by satellite. So I guess you could still expect to have some of the same issues as satellite customers from time to time.

David we don't have the AT&T U-Verse available in our area, otherwise we would have went with that. We have our long distance, internet and now DirecTV though AT&T so we got a bundled price as well as a discount due to my wife being retired from AT&T, we were paying more for Comcast than we do for DirecTV and didn't have the first premium channel, we have them all with Direct. I wasn't aware that I couldn't get an HD DVR with a single feed going into the room so it looks like I'll have to purchase a Tivo.

The pixelation breakup wasn't the reason I changed from Comcast to Direct, I could have lived with the occasional breakup but that dang smart azz girl really got under my skin and after that little episode there was no way in heck I was going to keep them. I was offered every discount, free premium channel and a couple of months free service whenever I called to cancel the service ... where was all of that love for the last nine years I wonder?

This may have been covered, but when I moved into my new HT room, my HD DVR had constant pixelation and frozen screens, while it was generally fine in the previous room. I added a drop-amp in the line in the attic and had the company run a new line to cut the cable run to this location by 2/3 and no more problems. For me, it was just a weak signal. A friend had a similar issue house wide. We added an amp and the problem cleared up.